Various products including coloring books and paint-by-number drawings have printed drawings on a paper substrate with specific areas intended to be colored or painted a specific color by the user. Such products would be enhanced by providing a source of releasable fragrance deposited on specific areas of the drawing that may be associated with a particular fragrance. For example, an area showing a flower could contain a source of releasable fragrance corresponding to the fragrance of that flower. A fragrance source for such purposes should be provided in a form such that the fragrance is not subject to premature release in routine handling and marketing of the product but remains securely contained and inert until released by the user during the act of coloring or painting. Other desired characteristics of the source of a releasable fragrance are that it should be readily applied to paper substrates, and any actions required for release of the fragrance should not interfere with normal coloring or painting. Providing for controlled release of fragrance from image areas in this manner would result in a significant educational benefit for children, contributing to their awareness regarding a depicted image and increasing their fun and interest in this activity.
Releasable fragrances contained in rupturable microcapsules are widely used in products such as advertising samplers. Microcapsules for this purpose may be prepared by preparing an emulsion of perfume oil droplets and forming capsule walls of an inert material such as gelatin or urea-formaldehyde around the droplets to obtain very small microcapsules, typically ranging upward in size from a few microns. The resulting microcapsules may be applied to selected areas of a paper substrate by use of a printing press or other known techniques. Release of the contained fragrance by the recipient of the sampler is obtained by scratching or rubbing of an exposed substrate, thus the designation of "scratch and sniff" as commonly applied to such products. Methods of preparing microcapsules and articles based on them are described in numerous prior patents, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 3,516,941, issued June 23, 1970, to Matson, and U.S. Pat. No. 4,277,364, issued July 7, 1981, to Shasha et al.